-LRB- CNN -RRB- -- What would you see if you could fly over Mars in a plane and look out the window ?

Victoria Crater as seen by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter . The crater is about half a mile in diameter .

It must be something like the thousands of curious , intriguing and spectacular images taken by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment -LRB- HiRISE -RRB- camera mounted on NASA 's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter .

The University of Arizona , Tucson , which operates HiRISE , has just released a new batch of these photos taken in the last several months .

You can check out the full set here .

They reveal an alien landscape of craters , valleys , ridges , channels , weird surface patterns and other features in incredible detail .

Take the stunning image on the left , which shows the muffin-cup-like Victoria Crater , a site once explored by the Mars rover Opportunity .

The camera is n't looking straight down , but is pointed 22 degrees east so we get a better view of the crater 's slopes , `` comparable to a view from an airplane window , '' the university says .

Looking at some of the photos , you feel like you 're flying over the Grand Canyon or the Sahara . Others are distinctly extraterrestrial in nature . In all cases , the images reveal lots of details about the surface of our neighbor in the solar system .

`` Each full image from HiRISE covers a strip of Martian ground 6 kilometers -LRB- 3.7 miles -RRB- wide , about two to four times that long , showing details as small as 1 meter , or yard , across , '' according to NASA 's Web site .

It might be the closest thing to visiting Mars without leaving your chair .

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Photos were taken by a camera mounted on NASA 's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter

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They show an alien landscape of craters , valleys , ridges in incredible detail

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A new batch of these photos taken in the last several months has just been released